Roberta Pergher

Assistant Professor, Department of History

Education

Ph.D. at University of Michigan, 2007

Contact Information

BH 724

812-855-4151

Background

I grew up in a small town in northern Italy and came to the US in the mid-1990s to attend college. After receiving a B.A. in economics and women’s studies and a M.A. in international studies from the University of Denver, I went on to study history at the University of Michigan. My dissertation explored the way the Fascist regime attempted to Italianize two recently conquered territories – the border province South Tyrol in the very North (my home region), and the colony of Libya to the South, across the Mediterranean. I found that the Fascist endeavor to incorporate these two rather disparate regions came to depend on the same policy: the settlement of Italian families. The actual settlers, however, were often driven by motivations that ran counter to those of state and party. Fascist Italy’s drive to incorporate and administer diverse regions is now at the center of my book project, titled Fascist Borderlands: Nation, Empire and Italy's Settlement Program, 1922-1943. I have expanded my analysis to include a number of “peripheries” in order to answer the question of how fascist Italy went about forging a nation and an empire at the same time. It is the tension inherent in these projects that intrigues me. What was to be nation, and what was to be empire? Who would belong to the one and who to the other? Throughout the project it has been fascinating to explore the character, contradictions, and enigmas of Italian expansionism with an eye on my own home region, where the tension between Italian and German speakers was particularly high in the interwar years, while locating this regional story in the broader context of Fascist nation-and empire-building from the Alps to Africa.

For my next project, I would like to write a cultural and social history of World War I in the Alps. Rather than revisiting the famous battles along the Piave, my study will analyze the war amidst Alpine cliffs and glaciers and its meaning for the soldiers as well as for the people living in the valleys below. Tentatively titled The Battle for the High Ground: Nationalism, Technology, and Nature on the Alpine Front in World War I, the book will build on memoirs, military sources, photographs, and on-site visits.